Perhaps you’ve experienced this before: The urge to do something nice in a Starbucks line, and deciding to “pay it forward” by buying the next person’s drink sight unseen.
You might think you’re doing a stranger a favor, but as one Starbucks customer tells it, you’re annoying a barista in the process.
That’s the lesson that came from TikTok creator ABC (@_abbienormal_), who put up her video detailing a conversation she had with a Starbucks worker on Sep. 1, getting more than 381,000 views since.
She reveals, “I just ended a ‘Pay it forward for the person behind you’ chain at Starbucks. I did. I did do that.” She then explains why she didn’t participate in the ritual popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Saying that she’s been caught up in them more than once, and always participates, she decided to check in with the Starbucks worker in the drive-thru line. “I’ll pay for the person behind me,” she explains. “I don’t care, but I have heard that it’s very annoying for baristas when people do this. And so I look at her, and I’m like, ‘All right, be honest with me. Like, is it annoying? Like, if I was to pay for the person behind me? Like, is that annoying for you guys?’”
The worker replied, “Honestly, yes.”
That led her to say, “All right, between you and me, girl, it ends here. It ends with us. I’m not gonna pay for the person behind me.”
She then wonders what the people in front of her paid, to compare it to her $11 order. She was shocked to learn they’d dished out $35.
“I don’t even feel bad about it now,” she remarks. “Not only is it annoying for the baristas, but $35? Pay for yourself.”
What Starbucks workers really think
The pay-it-forward ritual has been the bane of Starbucks workers’ existence for years now. A Daily Dot story from last December talked about it from the perspective of a customer who could barely afford their own drink and who didn’t want to feel compelled to buy a drink for someone else.
In that story, one barista suggested, “Instead of paying for the people behind you, who can probably afford their own stuff since they’re in line intending to pay, tip the people making your drinks who have been understaffed for months.”
Another observed, “It’s more of a hassle for us than people realize.”
A Today story from 2022 also explored the phenomenon, including an anecdote about a 2014 chain in St. Petersburg, Florida, that involved a staggering 378 customers.
In 2021, one Facebook user went viral, as the story reports, for speaking up on behalf of Starbucks workers once she left her job there.
“Pay it forward is extremely annoying and makes everything confusing,” she pointed out. “It makes it easy to hand out the wrong drinks and just sucks. Instead of paying for the people behind you, who can probably afford their own stuff since they’re in line intending to pay, tip the people making your drinks who have been understaffed for months.”
What commenters said
The TikTok video drew the opinions from viewers you might expect.
“As a barista? I thank you for your service,” one responded. “Sometimes I just lie and say the person behind is a mobile order and already paid for.”
Another said, “The one and only time this has ever felt good was when someone in front of me started the chain and my order was $28. And there was no one behind me! It was so sweet, I loved it.”
Someone else broke it down for people who didn’t understand why it might annoy workers. “In a job where we are expected to be stupidly fast? These little time additions can sometimes even get us in trouble for not producing results.”
One even revealed, “Last time someone paid for me, I rolled up to the window and the barista told me and then said, ‘Please don’t start this, take it and go.’”
@_abbienormal_ #starbucks ♬ original sound – ABC 🧿
The Daily Dot reached out to the creator via TikTok comment and to Starbucks via email.
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